Thursday, March 24, 2011

Later in my teaching practice I started writing grants to bring writers and illustrators to my school district. This helped me build a relationship with painter, musician and poet, Toby Lurie: http://www.tobypoet.com.

Toby is an amazing, creative, and unpredictable guy. (The link to his site will introduce you to his work. He shares many QuickTime audio clips of his work that trigger creativity.) It is fun to find him on the Internet after all these years.

I recall meeting him for the first time. Toby was wild white bearded poet with a dangerous gleam in his eye. One look at him and I realized that he was going to draw some lightening. I was the language arts coordinator for a conservative Nevada school district. I knew Toby was going to make waves and I was glad to aide and abet in a little artistic subversion. We were at the district's biggest high school. I'd planned a full school assembly, but an uptight vice principal sand bagged me and side tracked us to a remote spot in the school where they kept the 'tough' kids.

As I was about to introduce Toby to a huge high school class of alternative ed kids. I didn't have a clue what he was going to do. The rowdy with the bored vibe of caged cats. I was sure this crowd of edgy and angry high schoolers would tear him apart.

Just as I introduced Toby, he whispered in my ear, "Tell them I don't speak any English." I followed his lead and got out of the way.

Toby proceed to emote with sounds and facial gestures and within seconds he captured everyone's attention. He spoke gibberish but it didn't matter. This guy knew how to communicate with sound alone, words were an afterthought. The kids were riveted by the odd man capering and grunting in front of them.

By the end of the assembly everyone was up moving and chanting, found poetry echoed off the walls and we were all swimming in Toby's unique tone patterns. Sometimes it's good to be in alternative ed!

To really appreciate Toby's work you need to hear and see him. This new video Synesthesia Part 1 will give you a taste.

Several years later on one of his return visits, Toby taught me a great method that ties perfectly into the concepts of rhythm and sentence fluency. After a writing session, Toby had each student pick a single line from their work. Then he called 6-8 volunteers to come to the front of the room. They lined up shoulder to shoulder and started to read their lines in order from left to right. The first boy read. Then the second. Suddenly Toby would point back to the first and have him repeat the line. Toby would would mug and gesture and flail his arms all to draw more emotion and voice from the reader.

We soon understood that Toby was conducting a word orchestra.

They began reading their lines louder or lower, deadpan or angry, happy or weeping. Once the whole line had read once, Toby layered together a sound poem based on the melodies of repeated lines and varied voice.

Sometimes Toby had the same student read two or three times in a row or come back to one particularly powerful line repeatedly. No one in the chorus knew when they'd be called on and everyone was amazed at the nuances and lunacies that spilled out of it all.

Toby created a wild reader's theater display of word choice, sentence fluency, voice, organization, and ideas all wrapped in a spontaneously generated poem. It was hilarious, energizing and fun. Everyone loved it.

All of this points to the powerful mix of music, performance, and poetry that supports sentence fluency (and all the other traits as well).

I used this method myself two or three times a year for the rest of my classroom teaching career. I got so I could conduct a pretty good sound/word poem, but I could never top the Maestro!

This is a Nevada Print Guide and Teacher Workshops sharing materials from Northern Nevada's teacher inservices and print guide.

There are many lessons and resources for Primary Writers on this page. I also want to direct your attention to: Six By Six: Traits Writing for Little Writers. This inexpensive book offers thirty-six writing lessons (six lessons for each of the six traits...six by six).

In our online class, Teaching and Assessing Writing with the 6-Traits, we quickly develop a community of practice dedicated to sharing ideas, resources and methods about the 6-Traits. By the end of the course teachers know how powerful a like minded community can be.

WritingFix and their online groups will help any teacher seeking to improve their writing instruction find a supportive online community.

Join and online community of writing teachers! It's free and who knows where it will lead? 8-)

It has the look of a true jacket. Substantial and trim, not flimsy and baggy. You could navigate down the Zambezi and then proceed directly to high tea on Stanley's Terrace without raising any eyebrows.

This is a brief Interview with Dena and Corbett Harrison (the write couple). Corbett is the Webmaster and writer behind the great 6-Traits oriented WritingFix website http://www.writingfix.com/. Dena discusses how sharing the J.Peterman catalog with her students generated some great writing.

I had some fun running down these resources. I'm not sure how they might play for the current generation of kids in the seats who may not be Seinfeld fans. Not many will know who J.Peterman is. That's why I tried so hard to find the right video example of word choice and voice!

About Me

I am a life long educator. I won a Milken National Educator Award in 1995. The Milken Family Foundation introduced me to online education. After 25 years of classroom teaching I retired from k-12 education to pursue online teaching and instructional design full time. I have 39 years of teaching experience.